The Super Smash Bros series has had a diverse history. Super Smash Bros 64 introduced gamers to 4 play smash fests, and the ability to play with four players from a couch without needing split-screen. The competitive nature and esports potential of Super Smash Bros were apparent to hardcore gamers immediately. Unlike traditional fighting games in which the objective was to drain your opponents energy down to zero, Super Smash Bros operates as a platformer fighting game hybrid. The higher your opponents damage, the farther they fly from the stage. Once your opponents damage levels are at maximum, you can smash them off the stage.
What made Super Smash Bros 64 a fantastic game is that no character felt more overpowered than the other, every single character was broken. Mario had an overpowered punch attack, Pikachu could clear a stage with his thunder move, Link's hook shot had a broken range. The point being, no character felt more overpowered than the other. Super Smash Bros Melee improved on this formula by adding intense gravity to all of the fighters and made players rely on wave-dashing and precise combo strikes to win. The results were electrifying for competitive gamers!
Matches could become completed in under two minutes in Super Smash Bros because combos were so easy to pull together. It wasn't just about being good at stringing together combos in Melee that makes it a legendary video game, but the fact that without solid platformer knowledge, you will get beaten time and time again. Then along came Super Smash Bros Brawl and everything was ruined. MetaKnight was unleashed onto the Super Smash Bros competitive esports community and destroyed balance. He was the most overpowered fighting game character in history, and the competitive esports and MLG communities suffered accordingly.
Imagine a character with only one attack with any lag. The rest of the time MetaKnight has lagless movement, can combo with impunity, has near perfect recovery, and matched 70:30 with nearly every other character in the game, making him almost impossible to beat with certain fighters. The competitive Smash community was near ruined, because nearly everyone picked MK, and the character was banned to enable balance, which pissed off MK mains even more! Then hope arrived in the form of a genius mod, Brawl Minus. The theory of Brawl Minus is that to make a truly balanced and competitive fighting game, every single character needs to be broken and overpowered. So MetaKnight wasn't nerfed at all, but all the other characters got super buffs to make them as game breaking as Meta Knight. The result was an incredibly satisfying competitive experience where every character has potential to be the best!
The more broken fighting game characters are, the less a tier list is necessary. Brawl required a tier list because Meta Knight was so overpowered that esports suffered due to lack of competitive balancing. To make the next release on the Nintendo switch successful, will require Nintendo to make every single character overpowered, thus eliminating tier brackets, and giving individual skill and player persistence the top billing in who wins esports tournaments.
Halo 3 was a juggernaut of esports gaming because everyone starts out with the same weapons and abilities. Halo Reach and Halo 4 ruined this concept with armor abilities that broke game balancing, and only by Halo 5 did 343 learn the lesson and give everyone the same skills for maximum competitive value to the hardcore gamer. Everything is broken, or nothing is. The more overpowered all the core elements of your game experience is, the more balanced the gameplay is in turn. Pay to Play does not create a satisfying gaming experience, only when everyone is on a level playing field can proper skill gaps at esports become adequately determined!
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